The Mystical Figure Y: "Endless Things" begins

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

"Endless Things" begins with a different, tangible view of new worlds emerging from old -- a visit to the 1939 World's Fair by Pierce's parents, Axel and Winnie, and his Uncle Sam and his wife. Crowley describes "there were a hundred maps of the World of Tomorrow, all of them a little different. At the AT&T pavilion, Sam's wife Opel is selected to make a phone call to anyone and picks the town clerk their rural home in Bondieu, Kentucky. When the call doesn't go through, Crowley reminds us that "The World of Tomorrow" arrives in different places at different moments.

The excursion to the 1939 World's Fair comes as Hitler is invading Poland, his tanks famously rolling through the Polish cavalry. The World's Fair pavilions for Poland and Czechoslovakia embody the temporary persistance of the old order as the new world is created -- in this case, violently.

Pregnant with Pierce in the era before airconditioning, Winnie often takes refuge during the day in the American Museum of Natural History. The war in the Pacific now raging and she ponders the difference between the news stories of devastation and death on the island battlefields and the dioramas of placid wildlife: "Empty. Before humans." She is tempted to wish "men or Man had never gone to those places, never found them and put them at risk so thoughtlessly. For there were no birds there, she bet, no blossoms. Which led to the thought that it would be better if men hadn't come to be at all, the peace and endlessness without them: and she drew away from that thought in a little awe."

"Endless Things" will apparently take its form from the mystical figure "Y" -- the crossroad, the forking path the divides salvation from damnation, fortune from bad luck. It can also represent the cross -- the Tree of Life -- in the division between the saved and the damned that came with Christ's coming. And its stem can be seen as representing youth: before the major choices of adulthoood are made. "Its mystic significance is Choice: the two branches signify the paths of Virtue and Vice, respectively, the narrow right way leading to virtue, the wider left to vice."

The Y is also known as the "Samian figure," a character said to have been invented by Pythagoras. And, expressed by "the hand with bent forefinger," it represents the male member. Axel's Quiz Show failure came from his inability to answer a question about the Samian figure.

The boy Pierce who, from an early age, has "his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made" dwells on the inability to trace life backwards in order to reverse an errant decision: a wrong fork taken. "The Y -- the crosroad, the forking path -- only allows for forward movement. "There's no provision for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shot our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead . . . no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture."

Pierce nevertheless begins his new quest to retrace Fellowes Kraft's European expedition by retracing -- or revisiting anyway -- his past life: visiting his father and his lovers Julie and the gypsy Sphinx in New York and encountering his mentor Frank Walker Barr at JFK airport.